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Chapter 11: Bring the Dawn, Dispel the Darkness

Osho,Why have human beings gone through this struggle since the very beginning? Were there not already highly developed civilizations living on this earth? And yet their consciousness got lost and man had to start all over again. Right now it seems to be a particularly dark period. Is there such a cosmic law that says, “Only out of the mud the lotus can grow”? And will this earth ever become a garden of flowers? In deep gratitude and love.

The question that you have asked has tremendous implications in it. First, there have been many civilizations before our civilization which have reached to even higher peaks, but they all destroyed themselves because all those civilizations, including ours, have been growing in a deep imbalance. They developed great technologies, but they forgot that even the greatest technological progress is not going to make man more blissful, more peaceful, more loving, more compassionate.

Man’s consciousness has not grown with the same pace as his scientific progress, and that has been the cause of all the old civilizations destroying themselves. There was no outer cause, no outer enemy - the enemy was within man. He created monsters as far as machines are concerned, but he himself remained very retarded, unconscious, almost asleep. And it is very dangerous to give so much power to unconscious people.

The same is happening today. Politicians are the lowest kind as far as consciousness is concerned. They are clever, they are cunning, they are mean, too; and they make every effort for a single goal - how to be more powerful. Their only desire is for more power - not for more peace, not for more being, not for more truth, not for more love.

And what do you need more power for? - to dominate others, to destroy others. All the power accumulates in the hands of unconscious people. So on the one hand, politicians in all the civilizations that have developed and died - it would be better to say have committed suicide - had all the power in their hands. And on the other hand the genius of human intelligence was searching for more and more technological, scientific ways, and all that they discovered finally had to go into the hands of the politicians.

It was Albert Einstein who wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. He had escaped from Germany. In Germany he was researching atomic theory for Adolf Hitler, but reluctantly, because he was a Jew, and Adolf Hitler was killing Jews in such vast numbers that it seemed unbelievable. A single man killed six million Jews inside Germany. During the second world war Adolf Hitler was responsible for killing maybe fifty million people.